Originally posted 12/20/04
Beyond the Sea
Director: Kevin Spacey
Writers: Kevin Spacey, Lewis Colick
Producers: Jan Hantl, Arthur E. Friedman, Andy Paterson, Kevin Spacey
Stars: Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins, Brenda Blethyn, Caroline Aaron, William Ullrich
This is the second musical biopic this season which features legendary producer/songwriter Ahmet Ertegun as a supporting character. In Ray, he’s a savvy and encouraging mentor in both music and business to Ray Charles, and when he’s not behind the console he’s prodding Ray to find his own sound, or expressing nervousness at his latest groundbreaking escapade; and finally, showing unabashed pride that he negotiated a deal with a rival label so good that Ertegun’s label could never hope to match it. He’s not even the third or fourth lead character in Ray, so to see such well-rounded detail in his depiction is generous and winning.
In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey’s daring, odd, but ultimately off-putting musical/biographical tribute to Bobby Darin, Ertegun has only one scene with any significant dialogue. In it, he’s a record label suit who tries to convince Darin (Spacey) to stick with the teeny-bopper audience that loved his pop hit Splish Splash, and not take a foolish risk by crooning classic standards. Darin wins the argument with an insufferably cute contrived movie moment, then goes on to cut his Sinatra-esque album and prove what a dunce Ertegun was. Ertegun spends the rest of the movie in crowd scenes applauding Darin’s latest triumph.
I think this is a sign of what undermines this interesting failure. The lives, problems, and occupations of everyone around Darin are not really worth his detailed attention except for those inconvenient moments where they get in the way of his big dreams. Then they become opportunities for him to triumph and show what a Legend he is and how small-minded or selfish or shallow They are.
And I could fill this whole review detailing the uncomfortable way clearly awful details of his marriage to Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth) are skirted – when you find your new bride in screaming, crying hysterics in the closet on your wedding night, maybe it’s about more than just coming up with a cute way to convince her to have sex with you.
I’ve been wondering since I watched this movie if such self-involved tunnel vision is an inevitable result of the format. Spacey tries something admirably risky here which may have worked better on a Broadway stage – he fashions Darin’s life into a kind of celebratory revue, and frequently steps out of the drama to bring the lights up, let the extras take five, and argue with his colleagues (and the actor playing him as a child, William Ullrich) about what should come next. Scenes which start as drama have a habit of breaking into full musical numbers. It’s supposed to be a big fun hullabaloo of a show about Darin, Darin, and Darin, and the hope is we’ll get swept along in the zowie of it all.
We see that Walden Robert Cassotto was born to meager circumstances in the Bronx, that he suffered a crippling bout of rheumatic fever that left his heart heavily damaged and made any birthday past his 15th an unlikely miracle, and that Polly Cassotto (Brenda Blethyn, nailing the vibe of the movie as well as it can be nailed) encouraged his musical gifts and drew on her Vaudeville background to instill showmanship and driving work ethic in little Bobby.
Then, in a whirlwind, he became teen idol and movie star (even nominated for an Academy Award for Captain Newman, M.D.), wooed Sandra Dee away from her domineering mother (Greta Scacchi), crossed over to become a top-drawing club crooner, wrote and recorded hundreds of songs, dropped out of the public eye, learned a shocking and life-changing fact about his parentage, briefly walked out on his family to live in a trailer by the ocean, not-too-successfully reinvented himself as a hippie protest singer, then seemed to fold this new political awareness into a re-embraced lounge star image before succumbing to his health problems at 37. The conclusion the movie ultimately comes to about the fate of “Bobby Darin” is either ghoulish or just vain, but it is not magical in spite of its best intentions.
Spacey gets to show off his hoofery and a fine set of pipes – he’s a good dancer and hits every note and flourish and ad lib Darin did in famous recordings of hits like Mack the Knife, Beyond the Sea and on and on (he unaccountably struggles with Dream Lover). But there’s something missing in the singing, some almost-intangible red-blooded immediacy that might even momentarily help us forget that what we’re watching is just a very, very well-rehearsed act of mimicry. He’s internalized the melody, but left the life external.
Spacey’s best performances draw on that calculation in his eyes – they’re always slightly dull; softly smirking even when his lips aren’t joining in, as if to mask the active mind seeking the next way to get the upper hand on you. For Darin, whose life speaks more of heedless, almost fatalistic forward momentum, the innate reserve of Spacey the actor can’t hide from the camera.
And maybe it sounds like a lowbrow complaint (one he even winkingly attempts to dismiss), but at 45 he’s simply, unavoidably, too old for the part. When he romances Dee in Italy, the camera captures for us exactly what it’s seeing – not a love-struck kid in his early 20’s, but a middle-aged man relentlessly wearing down a teenage girl’s resistance. Even set to the strains of Beyond the Sea I am not charmed.
I consider Spacey a brilliant, but here miscast, actor and a dedicated producer – raising the money to realize his vision, which required shooting this largely-LA-set movie in Berlin and the UK, took some ingenuity – but also a pedestrian director and an imaginative but hackneyed writer. In Beyond the Sea the ideas come across but not the heart.
Once in awhile the music and the clothes and the energy are enough to shake everything to life and make the proceedings enjoyable. But the underlying premise requires that we look at Kevin Spacey and, despite the naked artifice of the movie’s structure, believe that he is Bobby Darin. And to not spare a care or second thought for anyone else on that screen. I don’t know if I’d want that to work even if it could.